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This will be the last sit rep from the 2015 NZ/Aus Marine Ecosystems Voyage. We are currently close to the north tip of New Zealand’s South Island and have slowed down so we arrive in Wellington at our scheduled time early tomorrow morning.
The whales did us proud on the final day with great views of a pygmy blue whale just before dusk. Earlier in the day we had sightings of sei and sperm whales as well as a bow-riding pod of 200 or so common dolphins.
This has been a fantastic voyage. The whale team has worked incredibly hard, the ship’s crew has been great and remarkably the weather, whales and ice were cooperative - mostly.
A huge thank you to all those people at the AAD, NIWA, ANZ and the DotE who made this voyage happen despite the ‘challenging’ timeframe.
To sign off, below are a few facts and figures about the voyage:
· Nearly 15,000 km travelled.
· Over 450 hours of observer effort yielding nearly 500 sightings of over 1000 cetaceans.
· Over 520 hours of whale song recordings with more than 40,000 individual calls detected.
· More than 21 groups of blue whales encountered, with photo-identification of 58 individuals.
· Biopsy samples from 11 humpback and blue whales.
· 40 trawls (18 demersal tows and 22 midwater tows).
· 45 gigabytes of echosounder acoustic data recorded.
· Nearly 1,000 hours of continuous underway oceanographic and atmospheric data collection.
· Over 3,500 litres of seawater filtered.
· 50 underway conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) profiles.
· Twelve Argo oceanographic floats deployed.
· Nine deployments of a continuous plankton recorder (CPR).
· One scientific paper already written and submitted (and many more to come).
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.